The state Liquor Control Board has an interesting job in the year ahead: to get into the weeds of how marijuana is grown, sold and used.

By The Seattle Times – Monday, December 3 2012

Washington voters’ decision to legalize marijuana means the state Liquor Control Board (LCB) now has a year to set regulations for the first-of-its-kind marijuana market.

But first, the small state agency must go on an even stranger mission — to get into the, well, weeds of how marijuana is grown, sold and used. I hope that the people give them hell for NOW trying to profit from it all lol.

At a hearing on Friday before a state Senate committee, Pat Kohler, the LCB director, said the agency would need to hire a consultant — a pot expert — to gather input from key groups of police, farmers, users and others to help her staff better “understand the product and the industry itself.”

The agency has been getting a lot of advice, said Rick Garza, Kohler’s deputy. “There’s a lot of people who think they have a lot of experience in this area,” Garza said, prompting laughs from lawmakers.

The voter-approved Initiative 502 requires the LCB to license and regulate a seed-to-store closed marijuana market, with the first licenses to be issued in late 2013. Based on a state fiscal analysis, it will be a big market: 363,000 users consuming 187,000 pounds of marijuana each year, with steep sin taxes generating more than $560 million a year.

The Washington State Liquor Control Board says it needs to hire 40 additional staff and bring an outside expert in marijuana to implement the voter-approved marijuana legalization measure.

In a briefing to a Senate committee in Olympia on Friday, LCB director Pat Kohler said the biggest challenge of setting up a regulated marijuana market was “understanding the product and the industry itself.”

“There’s a lot of people who think they have a lot of experience in this area,” joked Rick Garza, Kohler’s deputy.

The LCB is taking the lead in creating rules for state-licensed marijuana stores, growers and processors called for in Initiative 502, which passed 56-44 on Nov. 6. Friday’s hearing was the first chance for lawmakers to ask questions about the historic measure.

Kohler estimated there could be 328 stores – the same number of liquor stores under the now-defunct state liquor monopoly – but her staff needed to better understand potential customer demand, among other things. A state fiscal analysis predicted that 363,000 state residents would buy from the state stores, based on federal use surveys.

I really hope they dont try to set up some stereotypical stoner kid to be the “expert”. It SHOULD be a middle aged, regular consumer, who has struggled with other health problems or even addictions and overcome them. Someone who has done hours upon hours of research and study into the effects of medicinal uses, habitual use, as well as occasional “social” use. My fear is that they will appoint a bunch of cops to regulate it, and politicians to commercialize it.
They should be professional, knowledgeable, and intelligent.

The government sayes its a schedule I , that is to say it has no medical use . But the synthetic form of THC, the main chemical ingredient in the cannabis plant is curently classified as schedule III, a prescribed pill trademarked as marinol.

Medical Marijuana has now been decriminalized in 16 U.S. states & in Cannada.

The American Medical Association & American College of Physicians have both called on the federal government to review cannabis as a schdule I substance.

The National Cancer Institute, a part of the National Institute of health, added cannabis to its website last year as a Complementary Alternative Medicine (CAM), & recoginzed that,”Cannabis has been used for medicinal purposes for thousands of years prior to its current status as an illegal substance.” It also has a 80% approval rating among Americans according to several polls.

The Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution reinforces this idea of parallel sovereignty, declaring that the powers not delegated to the federal government are retained by the states.

The United States Supreme Court in Texas v. White held that states do not have the right to secede, though it did allow some possibility of the divisibility “through revolution, or through consent of the States.” Under the Constitution of the United States they are not allowed to conduct foreign policy.